


the price of the future

by Blue_Rive



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Apollo (Percy Jackson) Is Georgina's Godly Parent, Canon Bad Things Happen, Canon Compliant, Gen, So does Apollo, Trophonius is an asshole, georgie loves her moms, he misses his brother, hunter and lit get cameos, most of the waystation crew is mentioned, never let agamethus babysit, not really angst but not happy either, reckless self-endangerment by a seven year old, the background relationship is emmie/jo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 17:58:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21165782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Rive/pseuds/Blue_Rive
Summary: clairvoyancenounthe supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact.---Things are quickly going south with the Emperors, but Georgie's confident she can fix it. She just needs to go to the Oracle, and get some answers about all this.





	the price of the future

**Author's Note:**

> this turned out a bit shorter than i wanted to, but here! the dark prophecy is honestly the best book in TOA- it doesn't get enough love. 
> 
> betad by the amazing and wonderful Keyseeker, as usual!

Georgie read a lot. She couldn’t actually read- letters got all weird and twisted up when she tried- but her moms got her loads of audiobooks. And in those stories, one thing was made pretty clear- when you started getting mysterious prophetic dreams, you went out and did what they said. 

Her moms thought she didn’t know about their problems, but she was smarter than anybody thought. She knew the blemmyae had started attacking, and she knew it was because of the Triumvirate. When her moms started whispering about how they couldn’t survive a full-frontal assault, and then when Heloise and Abelard went missing, Georgie decided she had to do something about it.

That’s about when her dreams became stronger. ( _ What can I do? How can I help them? Where are the griffins?  _ You ask a question, and someone answers.) 

She’d always seen mouths of caves in her dream, flashes of a lake filled with snakes. Sometimes she woke up feeling like she’d been suffocating. Occasionally she dreamed of the future, a month or a year or two years in advance, but those scenes never told her anything useful, even though it was cool when they came true. (They always did.) 

But now she couldn’t sleep. She’d dream of the cave and she’d wake up with her heart pounding and then she couldn’t get back to sleep. 

This meant, Georgie decided, that the universe was trying to tell her something. She knew what the cave was- the entrance to the Oracle of Trophonius. Maybe she could get some answers there. 

She got up super early the next day. It was too quiet, and it wasn’t just because of the fact that the sun was just peeking up over the horizon ( _ Amaterasu, so lazy,  _ Apollo complained a hundred miles away to Leo Valdez). Usually, there were sounds of people stirring and the griffins going out to hunt around this time, but there was nothing, and no one. 

Georgie started trying to pry the window in her room open. She remembered it only opened a crack and turned around to find another one- only to come face to face with Agamethus. 

“Um, hi.” She tried to sidle in front of the window. 

Agamethus turned out his open palm in a ‘seriously?’ gesture.

“This isn’t what you think it is-” 

Agamethus pointed to a backpack that she didn’t remember being there. Georgie crouched in front of it and opened it - her art supplies were tucked neatly inside, along with her tablet and a box of Oreos.  _ For the snakes- I forgot about them!  _

“Thank you,” she told him quietly. Hoisting the backpack over her shoulders, she started to clamber out the window, then turned back to Agemethus. She wasn’t sure what to do - saying goodbye properly seemed too final suddenly. 

She didn’t have to decide, because he was hugging her now, cold and intangible.

He drew back and gave her the Magic 8 Ball.  _ GO. I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.  _

Georgie wiped her eyes, nodded, and clambered out the main room’s window. There was a bus stop a few blocks away. She walked down there and waited, spinning in circles around the pole. 

This gave her plenty of time to reconsider her choices. Her plan had sounded great in her head, but now that she was actually trying to  _ do  _ it she was a lot more nervous than she’d thought she’d be. Her hug with Agamethus felt too final somehow, and ‘untold horrors’ sounded less like something she wanted to learn about and more like something that would  _ totally kill her.  _ Heroes in books probably never felt this scared. But she couldn’t change her mind about it now! If she went back, it’d be anticlimactic and disappointing and also she wouldn’t have the information they needed and then they’d all  _ die,  _ and it’d be her fault. 

The bus arrived, and she counted out the money Agamenthus had given her and got a pass. “Have a great trip!” the bus driver said with blemmyae-over-the-top cheerfulness, setting off warning signs in Georgie’s brain. She tried to leave the bus, but he blocked her path. “Go to the back of the bus, please and thank you!”

No changing her mind now. She found herself a window seat and watched the Waystation vanish behind her. 

She knew in the future they’d set up guards, a type of monster that she couldn’t remember the name of right now (stanfords? No, that wasn’t it,) but they didn’t seem to be set up yet. Georgie had a sinking feeling that they would be put up when she was discovered, as a way of making sure no one else tried to use the Oracle. She tried to shake that out of her brain, and hopped the fence. The bus hadn’t moved, suspiciously idling by the stop, but no blemmyae came out to stop her. 

It felt almost like muscle memory, walking in a trance like she’d done it a thousand times before, her feet instinctively tracing over a well-worn path to the two streams, even though when she looked down all that was there was fresh-cut dewy grass that hadn’t been walked on in months. 

She knelt and drank from the streams, both at once. She couldn’t feel any effects quite yet, but it’d set in soon. She had to get going. 

Georgie knelt on her hands and knees, feeling her way down the slick cave shaft until it opened up into a wider area. A deep pool of water was in the middle, leaving her only a slippery ledge that she had to feel her way across. Maybe she could just.. jump in. A swim sounded fun. Wasn’t that why she was here, anyway? Wait, no it wasn’t. What  _ was  _ she doing here? This was no place for a… how old was she? Nine? Ten? 

She tried to cast in the dark for her memories. Music, a strange old tune that she remembered with strange clarity. The griffins . ...the griffins!  _ That  _ was what she was here for! 

She stood up, moving off the ledge to firmer ground. “Hello?” It echoed for a long time, banging around the walls.  _ Hello? Hello? Hello? _

A while after it faded, she started to hear a vague hissing. She couldn’t seem to remember what it meant, though she knew it was important. “...Python?” No, that wasn’t right. She didn’t think he liked Oreos. 

She emerged out into a cavern, with a lake boiling and bubbling with brine. Or wait. Those were just poisonous snakes. 

She dug in her bags for the cookies and threw them out into one corner, leaving a path free for her to go to the island. Even with the snakes distracted, she didn’t like the idea of crossing the lake. 

_ Come on, Georgie. In books, you have to be brave sometimes. _

She took a deep breath and waded through, making it to the island without getting attacked by any snakes. It seemed hazier up here for some reason, purple tinging her vision. 

As she watched, the haze coalesced into a tall figure, smiling cruelly. 

“Hello, sister,” he said, voice echoing around the cavern and worming its way into her mind. “Have a nice trip?”

_ Calm down, he’s part of the Oracle, you  _ know  _ that,  _ Georgie told herself, straightening up and lifting her chin. 

“Sister?” 

“Yes, sister. You don’t know much about your past.” There’s an underlayer to that.  _ I can tell you. For the price of your sanity. _

Georgie laced her fingers through the knit on her sweater. “My moms didn’t mention  _ you.”  _ She’s comfortable with not knowing about her past, regards what happened with Agamethus as a backstory, like book characters had. She’d always thought her birth parents were dead. All the protagonists in things were orphans. But if she’s related to Trophonius, it’s gotta be cooler than she thought. “Are you Agamethus’ brother?”

Trophonius’ eyes widened, in something like surprise, or maybe sorrow, before hardening over again. “Is that your question,  _ supplicant.” You’re not my sister like he was my brother. Calling you that sets you off guard, but it’s not worth it. _

“No!” Georgie yelped. “I need to know how to defeat Commodus.” 

With a flick of his hand, Trophonius sent out a curl of purple mist, sliding in around her hair and eyes and the cuts in her skin. Georgie stiffened, feeling him sort through her future.  _ I can’t tell anything. Am I supposed to know what happens now?  _

Trophonius laughed darkly. “You have an… interesting future, Georgina Walker. A special message for you, then?” 

The future tells Georgie things sometimes, and right now it’s telling her that this is going to go  _ very wrong very quickly.  _ Before she can move out of the way, Trophonius snaps his fingers, and she plunges into darkness. 

Visions start flashing past her eyes, most of them too quick to make out properly. She has an odd flash of a blonde man, smiling at her, picking a daisy and tucking it behind her ear. A fast forward through her time at the Waystation, a few moments she hadn’t remembered properly before standing out. The strawberries in her mom Emmie’s rooftop garden and how they tasted like sunshine. Her, four or so, clambering up on Abelard’s back and pestering him to take her flying. Her mom Jo finally letting her help with the work on the forge, last week. And then- a lurch, throwing her into the future. The next few days- a girl with white-blond hair and a parka, talking about Artemis and trying to reassure her about something-  _ what?  _ A flash of the griffins, before she was pulled away. A scarred teenager, scowling at the ties binding her hands. Further along- a crossbow pressed to her head, her heart racing. Someone with curly hair and freckles who seemed familiar in a weird way, and his two friends, a darkskinned girl with pretty long hair and a boy who seemed just as good at making things as her mom Jo, and she’d thought no one could be better than her mom at that. 

A supernova of light, blinding her. A strange, darker, blurrier memory of the same man who’d picked the daisy for her in her first vision, sitting in an opulent room with his head in his hands. A broken yell, loud enough to wake her up. 

She’d stumbled outside somehow, blemyaee holding her up, hands tied loosely with zip ties. She had the hazy feeling she should be worried about that, but she didn’t know why. 

She started to laugh, a cracked version of Trophonius’, mingled with her normal one and drowning it out. It was all so clear, now. She didn’t know why she’d been so confused. She knew exactly what was going to happen next. She let the blemyaee drag her away. 

Everything was going to work out.


End file.
